1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technology for assisting in composing work of music. The present invention also relates to a technology for assisting in searching sound materials used for composing music.
2. Description of the Related Art
A variety of music creation application programs, which are called a “loop sequencer”, have been provided along with the spread of so-called Desk Top Music (DTM). The loop sequencer is a program that generates a phrase by mapping sound samples, which are sound waveforms of partial time sections of a piece of music such as one measure corresponding to the intro of the piece of music and four measures corresponding to drum solo, onto the time axis and that repeats reproduction of the generated phrase. The loop sequencer provides an editing screen which allows the user to specify an arrangement of sounds in one period of a phrase included in a piece of music. When the user has specified an arrangement of sounds through this editing screen, a piece of music which repeats the arrangement of sounds as one period of a phrase is performed through the loop sequencer. An example reference regarding this type of loop sequencer is Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2008-225200.
In some case, a piece of music including a plurality of phrases that are played simultaneously is composed and performed. In this case, it takes a lot of trial and error to perform adjustment of the timing relationship of phrases or the like. The conventional loop sequencer causes trouble since it is necessary to change the timings of generation of sounds of each phrase one by one each time such trial and error is done.
There is known another music performance apparatus having a database collecting sound materials which are segments of sound waveforms. The music performance apparatus connects sound materials searched from the database to create a phrase for performing a piece of music. The database of such a type of the music performance apparatus stores a plurality of types of sound materials and a plurality of types of feature quantities which are obtained for each of the sound materials. Each sound material and its feature quantities are stored in the database in correspondence to each other. When a user specifies, as a searcher, feature quantities of a sound material imaged by the user through a search screen, a sound material having feature quantities close to the specified feature quantities is searched from the database and provided as components of the phrase. An example reference regarding this type of the apparatus is Japanese Patent Application Publication No. H07-121163.
However, the searching screen of the conventional music performance apparatus is often provided with condition input columns for specifying feature quantities as searching conditions independently for each of a plurality of types of features. Therefore, in case that the user searches for the sound materials using the plurality of types of features as the searching condition, there is a problem that the user cannot well grasp the searching condition of the sound material desired by the user even when the user vies the contents of the condition input columns.